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gcloud is the command line interface(CLI) tool for interacting with GCP services. Per Google’s product overview page for gcloud – “The Cloud SDK is a set of tools for Cloud Platform. It contains gcloud, gsutil, and bq, which you can use to access Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage, Google BigQuery, and other products and services from the command-line. You can run these tools interactively or in your automated scripts”.

Let us download, install and initialize this tool in an interactive manner, accept all default settings for all prompts –

Only the core components of the gcloud sdk are installed during initial installation. For any additional component to interact with GCP, you have to install the additional component. For instance, to install the component for interactive with Google Kubernetes Engine(GKE) you have to install kubectl

gcloud components install kubectl

Many features of GCP are available in Beta only, for that you have to install the beta component –

Ansible is a powerful tool for automation, its syntax checking, verbose and dry run mode features make it a reliable and safe tool. It is particularly popular in IT infrastructure automation, such as application deployment or full fledged infrastructure plus app deployment. As an integral part of DevOps tool-set, it falls into the category of Chef, Puppet, Salt or CFEngine for the critical role it plays in IT infrastructure, Application Deployment, Configuration Management and Continuous Delivery.

In this short blog, I am writing about a little known or less popular usage of Ansible – executing it like a shell script. In a Unix-like operating system, any text file with its content starting with a #! aka Shebang, is executed by passing the text file as an argument to the characters following the Shebang. For instance, a text file /tmp/myscript.sh with its content starting with the characters #!/bin/bash is run by the program loader as /bin/bash /tmp/myscript. Following the same logic, we can execute any ansible playbook by simply starting the content of the playbook file with a path to the ansible executable.

Thus for me to execute my playbooks just like a script, the first thing I need to know is the path to my Ansible executable –

$ which ansible
/usr/local/bin/ansible

And have a playbook – in this case, I will use two playbook – one which adds a user and the second one which deletes the same user as examples.
Notice that I am naming the playbook just like a shell script and made it executable –

MySQL supports several storage engines such as InnoDB, MyISAM, BLACKHOLE, CSV. Depending on your use case, you might configure your MySQL table to use certain storage engine. To see the list of storage engines MySQL supports, simply run “SHOWENGINES\G” under a mysql prompt.

To find out the particular storage engine used by a table, run the ‘show table status’ command for the named table as below. The first example is the mysql user table, which uses InnoDB –

InnoDB: is a transaction-safe (ACID compliant) storage engine for MySQL that has commit, rollback, and crash-recovery capabilities to protect user data.

MyISAM: These tables have a small footprint. Table-level locking limits the performance in read/write workloads, so it is often used in read-only or read-mostly workloads in Web and data warehousing configurations.

Memory: Stores all data in RAM, for fast access in environments that require quick lookups of non-critical data.

CSV: Its tables are really text files with comma-separated values. CSV tables let you import or dump data in CSV format, to exchange data with scripts and applications that read and write that same format.

Archive: These compact, unindexed tables are intended for storing and retrieving large amounts of seldom-referenced historical, archived, or security audit information.

Blackhole: The Blackhole storage engine accepts but does not store data, similar to the Unix /dev/null device. Queries always return an empty set.

nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet

I actually saw this error in a Docker host, and Docker uses iptables and allof Docker’s iptables rules are added to the DOCKER chain. In this case though, it wasn’t the Docker iptables rules that were a problem, it is just that limits were reached in the connection tracking of the netfilter module. You might see this error in /var/log/messages or /var/log/kern –

You can view the conference details, calendar and registration information here.

The conference name is generally referred by Google as NEXT, and this year’s – “Next ’18 is a three day global exhibition of inspiration, innovation, and education where we learn from one another how the cloud can transform how we work and power everyone’s successes.” The event has several hands on sessions, the main themes of the sessions are –

After intensive investing in Cloud Computing, particularly geared towards enterprises, Google has finally joined Amazon (Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft (Azure) as a leader in Infrastrucutre as a service (Iaas) in Gartner’s Magic Quadran for 2018. GCP – Google Cloud Platform – is very intuitive to use and particular popular among data scientists.

“Google has clambered into the leaders’ section of Gartner’s latest infrastructure as a service (IaaS) Magic Quadrant, while the wheat has been separated from the chaff.

The annual report concluded that the cloud IaaS market is now a three-horse race in the top right box, with the leaders’ zone not being an Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft-only area for the first time since 2013. …

“We’re pleased to announce that Gartner recently named Google as a Leader in the 2018 Gartner Infrastructure as a Service Magic Quadrant.
With an increasing number of enterprises turning to the cloud to build and scale their businesses, research from organizations like Gartner can help you evaluate and compare cloud providers.